The first election in Kansas under a new state law requiring voters to show photo identification appears to have gone smoothly.  Story at the link

Texas AG Abbott tweets that the SCOTUS Justices concerned about lower court ruling.  Kennedy seemed supportive of Texas.  

Injustice comes to Tampa next Thursday, January 12, at noon at the Tampa Club.  Sign up here.  I’ll have books to sign.  The event is sponsored by the Tampa Federalist Society Lawyers Chapter.

A new state law requires those who buy drain cleaners and other caustic substances to provide photo identification and sign a log.  Full story at the link.

Doesn’t everyone have a constitutional right in America to unclog their drains?

Thats the headline at the link.  I know it’s a reach but it may be fair to say that liberals in Nashville are not happy.

House Speaker Beth Harwell denies trying to gerrymander liberal Nashville Democrats Sherry Jones and Mike Stewart out of public office. Meeting with reporters after the unveiling of the GOP House redistricting plan this morning, Harwell said Republicans had no choice but to throw Stewart and Jones into the same district.

“There was absolutely no way to avoid that,” she said. “If you look at Rep. Mike Stewart’s district, it’s a downtown district. The population just doesn’t justify a downtown district. The growth in Davidson County has certainly happened on the southern border, and that’s why we had to put a new district there. We’ve gone out of our way to be as fair as possible. I can’t control the demographics of this state.”

Jones says she believes she was singled out because of her outspoken advocacy of liberal causes. Notably, she is one of the legislature’s few remaining strong proponents of abortion rights. Stewart, too, has been an increasingly vocal liberal, often taking the side of organized labor on issues before the House.

 Pacific Daily News.

Story here.  “He has a particularly hard time explaining how the South Carolina requirement of government-issued photo identification amounts to a ‘poll tax’ when the state has also made provisions to provide that identification, free of charge. Hear that, Mr. Attorney General? The only thing the voter has to do is show up and get his or her photo taken. And if that’s too much darn trouble well, then, that person can do something else on election day.”

At the Wall Street Journal:

Millions more Americans will be required to show photo identification when they head to the polls in four states in 2012, headlining the welter of new laws across the nation that take effect with the turn of the year.

Kansas, Rhode Island, Tennessee and Texas will require voters to prove their identities at the ballot box, bringing the total number of states that require some form of voter identification to 30, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures, a bipartisan group that provides research and data to state governments.

…”Voter ID was definitely a hot issue, and the debate around it was close to boiling over,” says Meagan Dorsch, the NCLS’s director of public affairs. “I think that in 2012 we could be looking at a flurry of lawsuits over voter ID laws passed in 2011.”

Philadelphia Inquirer on Voter ID: “The U.S. Department of Justice is taking a hard line with states that pass restrictive voting laws, which is good news for disadvantaged Americans who want their right to vote protected.”

Philadelphia Inquirer on armed New Black Panthers at a poll: “The Obama Justice Department decided not to pursue any penalties against Jackson, who was actually a certified poll watcher. . . .  That’s not to say small hate groups aren’t dangerous. But the scale of justice must be applied appropriately, and here it appears that it was.”

video at the link describing future legal and political battles over voter ID.